One of the supposedly "illogical" or "extreme" positions taken by
environmentalists is the protection of species for their own sake,
regardless of whether we know the consequences of their loss. "Who needs
the spotted owl?" and the like.
In a purely competitive model, it is hard to justify preservation of any
individual species, I think. In fact, one can justify the loss of a species
by saying that it failed to compete effectively and got its just reward.
But as we come to understand how nature collaborates, it seems that we can
regard any species as the repository of a set of solutions to the problems
of co-evolution. Loss of a species makes the ecosystem stupider, if you
will, which is a bad thing. I'll elaborate.
To the degree that species share information, through exchange of genetic
materials and the very act of co-evolution, loss of a species is the loss of
a set of solutions that could benefit the entire ecosystem. Of course, the
notion that species share information is a very new one and not especially
well understood. However, it seems increasingly clear that endosymbiosis,
exchange of genetic material via viruses and other mechanisms exist for this
to happen. Collaboration exists in nature; species are not as isolated from
one another as we often imagine, especially in schoolbook biology, which
tends to ignore, for example, the fact that the line between one species and
another is often fuzzy.
In other words, loss of a species is like the loss of a library in the world
of human information. At the very least, even if the information in the
library is duplicated elsewhere, it becomes less accessible. We don't
really know what is stored in the "libraries" of species-carried knowledge,
so the logic of preserving species is "keep as many libraries as possible,"
not "this genetic library, the spotted owl, has x, y and z in it, so it must
be saved." And some of those libraries hold human-benefiting medicines and
such, too.
I did a bit of searching to see if anyone has articulated this idea more
clearly, but the word "library" is difficult to disambiguate. Pointers in
this direction would be welcome. (In other words, I'm hoping that in the
collective Brin-L library of knowledge, someone has a reference.)
I will acknowledge that the preservation of *every* species is an
unwarranted extremist position, since competition certainly is a major
contributor to order in biology. But slowing down the human rate of species
destruction would see to be utterly logical.
Nick Arnett
Direct phone: 408-733-7613 Fax: 408-904-7198
